Spring RTS Engine

Yo. Is there a special trick to get steep slopes from looking like crap when the map detail is at 32?

I'm tired of having to use lowpass to make my maps come out looking reasonable on an average user's computer, was wondering if there are any tricks that might help.

I've tried using raw, and the problem there is that stuff looks great in preview in World Machine / L3DT, but looks terrible in Spring unless the map detail setting is way the hell up, due to triangles popping, etc. Given that anything over about 60 starts to seriously choke people's CPUs, due to the error-correction problems with SMF I brought up several months ago, which are still unaddressed... meh, should I just burn a lightmap to suggest a lot more detail than I actually have, and settle for melted-looking actual geometry, or is there a way to get around this?

Very annoyed, been working on new maps for the last 4 hours and it really looks like I'm wasting my time thus far, trying for big plateaus.

use the home and end keys ingame to set viewdistance, which determines the amount of polys used for terrain. depending on your computer you can have it set pretty high - mines about 300.

also try and avoid extremely steep cliffs, as they stretch the texture and look like crap anyway. also, yes, use normal maps and lightbake your map.

use the home and end keys ingame to set viewdistance, which determines the amount of polys used for terrain

Yeah, that's what I was talking about. I'm saying I'm trying to get it to look at decent at default settings.

It looks just fine if I jack it all the way up to 160+, but nobody plays with settings that high, it's a CPU-killer. But to get it to look OK at 32, I have to blur it quite a bit, and it's basically ruined at that point.

Here, I'll make some screens. This is really annoying me though- the map looked great until this started happening...

And yeah, I'll go ahead and bake the lights, I hope that helps with this.

Aha, found one thing that went wrong. Seems that L3DT's heightmap is flipped vertically from my starting RAW... lol.

raw sure is a pain in the ass format

Yeah. Almost done, getting the lighting right and putting World Builder stuff on it.

Finally got it right. Thanks hunter, baking the lightmap really helped with the final look.

Argh, I play with fairly high viewdistance most of the time, round 150 - 200 mabe. I just reduce it if the lag really comes on. Also, the map format is what breaks steep slopes, fix can only come with new format.

Yeah, baked normalmapped textures look like pure sex dont they?

I dont set viewdistance under 100 ever. I just hate the way it looks when its too low.

The map renderer breaks steep slopes, not the format. The format is just a heightmap + texture after all, it can be rendered without popping triangles and shifting textures fine.

Tobi wrote:The map renderer breaks steep slopes, not the format. The format is just a heightmap + texture after all, it can be rendered without popping triangles and shifting textures fine.

oh i meant the fact that 1-2 pixels are stretched onto a wall.

Spring ships with viewdistance set at 32, IIRC. I need to put an auto-configurator into the game...

On my hardware, the game is hardly playable past 60+, with much of anything going on. Doesn't really matter what game it is.

If you're ever bored, hit /wiremap and stare at the polycount when you go anywhere over 100, it's hilarious how many triangles are getting used, vs what you see.

BaNa wrote:

Tobi wrote:The map renderer breaks steep slopes, not the format. The format is just a heightmap + texture after all, it can be rendered without popping triangles and shifting textures fine.

oh i meant the fact that 1-2 pixels are stretched onto a wall.

Ah right, that is indeed inherent in projecting a single texture onto a heightmap from above.

(EDIT: though maybe there exists more advanced texture coordinate generation for heightmap rendering which reduces this a bit.. don't know, never looked into it.)